On a warm summer day in July 1888, my father, Captain Alfred E. Hunt, was working on a metallurgical problem in the small quarters of the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, on Fourth Avenue of that city. He was expecting a visit from an acquaintance, Romaine C. Cole, who had assisted him earlier in the 1880s with experimental but unsuccessful attempts to convert alumina (that is, aluminum oxide) into aluminum through the use of an open hearth furnace.

Later, Romaine Cole met a young man at Lockport, New York, who had an entirely new process for making aluminum. Cole had watched this process in operation and had begun to appreciate its possibilities. Remembering Captain Hunt's interest in aluminum, he made a trip to Pittsburgh to tell him of the discovery, hoping to secure his help in promoting it. The electrolytic process, invented by Charles Martin Hall, immediately aroused the interest of Captain Hunt.

Through training and experience, Captain Hunt was well equipped to make a sound scientific appraisal of the invention about which Cole told him that summer afternoon in 1888. The Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory had already established a good reputation for itself in the field of testing materials, engineering inspection, chemistry, and metallurgy-and Alfred E. Hunt, the metallurgist, was one of its proprietors.

A New Englander by birth, he was graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in Metallurgy and Mining, in 1876. His first job was obtained in Boston, with the Bay State Iron Works, which was then operating the first open hearth steel furnace in the United States of America. Following that, he was in charge of the open hearth department of the Nashua Iron & Steel Company, in Nashua, New Hampshire.

In a manner of speaking, you might say that I know the story first-hand from here on...

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